What If Time Travel Already Exists?
Back in 2009, Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travellers, complete with a buffet,
balloons, and chilled champagne.
He waited for his guests to arrive, but ultimately no one came…
After all, he’d sent out the invitations only after he had thrown the party.
Hawking saw this as proof that time travel didn’t exist, but couldn’t deny throughout
his career that it may be possible.
This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if time travel
already exists?
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Time travel is one of the most popular modern sci-fi tropes around, present in series ranging
from “Harry Potter” to “Doctor Who”, “Star Trek” and more.
However, the concept of travelling in time via mechanical means was first popularized
more than a century ago in 1895 by HG Wells’ novel “The Time Machine”.
Though it may seem like it belongs only in fiction, however, time travel is scientifically
plausible, and in fact, technically does already exist.
That’s because Einstein's theory of Special Relativity explains that time is subjective
and can speed up or slow down depending on how fast you’re going.
So, if you travel near the speed of light for five years in your time, decades could
have passed back on Earth.
Everyone you knew before your trip will have grown old, even though from your perspective
only a few years will’ve passed.
So, today’s question, on the face of it, is very plausible...
Time travel (to the future, at least) is an idea with sound science to back it up.
In fact, some astronauts have already time travelled into the future, but only by the
smallest of margins.
Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka can reasonably claim to be the world’s most prolific time
traveller, as he has spent more time in orbit around the Earth than anyone else.
Because of time dilation, he’s time travelled around 0.02 seconds into the future during
his missions, meaning he’s aged 0.02 seconds less than everyone else alive.
But that’s only time travelling forwards.
What about travelling backwards in time?
It’s a notoriously tricky concept, and there are certain paradoxes that come into play…
including Bootstrap Theory, which says that bringing an object back in time means that
that object existed before it was created, and so has no determinable origin; a clear
problem.
Then there’s the Grandfather Paradox which posits that if someone were to go back and
kill their grandfather, they would prevent themselves from ever being born, and so would
never have been able to go back in time in the first place; another sizeable issue!
However, both of these can be solved if we assume infinite timelines and universes - allowing
for all of the possibilities to unfold.
So, if time travel exists, it’s almost certain that there are also countless timelines to
cater for it, with “new realities” forming every few seconds.
In which case, would we ever know that time travel exists, even if it already does?
There’s a chance we might not.
If technology is developed that allows us to travel around the speed of light, to push
us into the future, it would have zero effect on us in the here and now.
So, as we live our everyday lives driving to work, eating lunch, and watching TV, there’s
a seemingly distant (though still very real) possibility that someone else is jetting off
in front of you, aging far less rapidly than you are.
That person could theoretically travel to the year 2100 having only aged a year or two….
But we’d never know about them because we’d likely never meet them.
And if we did meet them, we’d perhaps be sceptical of their story.
But still, via those potentially infinite universes and timelines, we could all be experiencing
the effects of time travellers messing up our own timelines every day.
Say someone travelled back in time to prevent you getting in a car accident; they’d then
split your life into two; one where you crash in a fatal accident, and another where you
don’t.
Every time someone spliced your original timeline, they’d birth new ones right alongside it
- and the multiverse becomes an ever-thickening web of everything that ever was, is or could
be.
But you, as in the “original you” living in your “original timeline”, would be
completely oblivious and would never know that time travel existed or that it had shaped
your life to this point.
On the other hand, if you were living across one of the other timelines, you might come
face-to-face with solid proof of time travel.
So, somewhere out there, a different you could even be time travelling right now - completely
aware that you exist even if you’re unaware that they do.
If technology for travelling to the past has already been invented (after all, if it’s
to ever exist, then why not right now?) it’s likely that world governments would keep it
under strict lock and key… as that sort of tech could cause huge problems.
Unless time travel was rigorously regulated, anyone and everyone could show up in all sorts
of time periods, leaving artefacts from the future, blowing their own cover, and altering
human history.
Changing even the smallest thing could send ripples through time all the way up to the
moment you yourself first time travelled - which could be disastrous for the world around you.
So, if time travel already exists, then there’s surely a “time police”, too.
It’d be their job to stop others from creating chaos - like a time travel version of the
Men in Black, maybe even erasing your memory if you’d ever seen anything you weren’t
supposed to.
More specifically, if time travel really was real, it could provide answers to some unexplained
phenomena in our standard, non-time-travel lives.
It could be that Déjà vu is simply the experience of having our own timeline split by an unknown
time traveller’s actions, leaving us to feel as though we’ve experienced the same
thing twice.
The Mandela Effect, causing shared but incorrect memories, might be another sign.
Common examples range from believing that Curious George has a tail (he doesn’t),
to recalling that Nelson Mandela passed away in prison (he didn’t).
If time travel already exists, these false memories could be down to some kind of glitch
caused by an errant traveller’s antics.
There’s no doubt, though, that if time travel does exist, those who know about it and can
use it have unrivalled power.
They’d have prior access to news stories, exam questions and lottery numbers (unless
the “time police” outlawed it) and, for as long as they could even glimpse the future,
they’d know which companies were best to invest in.
More than money, though, they’d have the ability to peek through anybody’s life story
at any time… and potentially the power to reshape, redirect, prolong or cut short any
life they felt like.
Without even knowing it, those not privy to time travel would be completely under the
time travellers’ control.
And the scary part?
If you accept that time travel’s even theoretically possible, then all of that should inevitably
be happening right now.
Because, if time travel is to ever exist, then surely it already does?
Someone, somewhere, at some time should’ve already mastered it.
And that’s what would happen if time travel already exists.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you
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